Christmas shopping in August? The very idea makes me boil...

By JOHN HUMPHRYS

Last updated at 23:47 09 August 2006

The study in my London home overlooks a park. The conkers are ripening nicely on the stately horse chestnut trees. Not as many as usual because of the drought, but the leaves cast welcome patches of shade for people who have had enough sun for the day.

Toddlers are splashing and screaming in the paddling pool. The tennis courts are full of sweating players and the little café is doing a tremendous trade in ice creams. This is the perfect picture of a perfect English summer’s day.

A couple of miles away in the heart of the city, the shops are also doing well — selling Christmas decorations. Yes, Christmas is just around the corner and the big stores have started cashing in.

But hang on a minute, it’s not. Christmas is not just around the corner. It’s not even on the horizon. It is 142 days away. I was going to say ‘142 shopping days’, but that expression is no longer relevant.

Every day is a shopping day now. And it is never too soon to start thinking about Christmas. Or so the stores would have us believe.

Selfridges opened their Christmas shop yesterday, but Harrods had pipped them to the post and opened theirs the day before.

They were the first, and this is the earliest it has ever happened. Normally it’s well into September — which is still ludicrously early.

Obviously there was a Father Christmas at Harrods. Rather less obviously, he was accompanied by a zebra instead of a reindeer. But let’s not quibble about that. If you start selling Christmas in the second week of August, why shouldn’t he have a zebra?

Next year, no doubt, the beard will be gone (far too hot in July, which is when itthe shop will probably open by then), and he’ll be wearing a T-shirt and shorts. To hell with tradition, this is commerce.

If you put aside the zebra and the fact that the air conditioning was humming to cool the customers down, there was not much to distinguish this from any other day in the run-up to Christmas.

They were even playing White Christmas over the speakers.

White Christmas in August! It’s the staff I feel sorry for. It’s bad enough having your ear drums assaulted with dreadful Christmas muzak in December, but there’s going to be months of it. I hope the store’s offering free counselling.

You could buy all your Christmas decorations if you were so inclined, or such tasteful items as an Elvis figurine for a modest £329. Or perhaps you would prefer to splash out £1,699 for a giant Mother Christmas.

They’re aimed at the American market, it seemed. And the store admitted to me that Elvis was actually one of the ‘slower selling lines’.

Harrods’ corporate communications director Peter Willasey was slightly on the defensive about the whole thing when I spoke to him on Today. But only slightly. ‘It’s not as if it’s the whole store’, he protested.

Well true, Harrods is a very big store. But the Christmas shop is 15,000 sq fuare feet and that’s about the size of ten average semis. So why are they doing it so early? How can this possibly be justified?

The answer, it will not surprise you to learn, is customer demand. That’s what Mr Willasey said. It always is.

Whenever a commercial organisation does something that strikes most of us as barmy or even offensive, they will tell us that they wouldn’t do it unless that is what their customers wanted. And of course there’s an element of truth in that.

No company would last long if it offered its customers something they didn’t want. But it’s not as simple as that.

Retailing is a highly developed skill. A good retailer will do much more than sell you things you know you want. Any one of us can do that. But they sell you things you didn’t know you wanted.

You can get a degree in it. The very best of them — such as Sir Terry Leahy at Tesco or Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer — know what we want before we know it ourselves. And they become very rich in the process.

Sometimes they get it wrong. Stuart Rose was almost embarrassingly frank when M&S opened a big new store in Birmingham that the customers didn’t like. He said: ‘We screwed up big time. We p****d off a lot of customers.’

But mostly they don’t. British retailers are among the best in the world — which is another way of saying they sell us an awful lot of things we probably don’t really want, and do various things of which we disapprove — such as Christmas shopping in August.

I bet you don’t want it. I bet you’d prefer to keep Christmas just a little bit special. But then, if I asked you whether you like old-fashioned High Streets with athe butcher, a the baker and a the candlestick maker, I bet you’d say yes. Yet we all shop in the supermarkets that have led to so many little shops going out of business.

And I know — because of the reaction to a piece that I wrote in these columns last winter about the commercialisation of Christmas — that you don’t like it.

But guess what’s happened since Harrods opened their Christmas shop.

Sales for the past couple of days are 20 per cent. higher than they were for the same period last year. So someone out there wants to buy their Christmas decorations in August.

You have to admire the stiff upper lip of the good old Church of England, battered and bruised by the relentless drift from God to Mammon.

A spokesman said of Harrods: ‘It’s great that people can’t wait to celebrate the birth of Christ. But who really needs five months to do their Christmas shopping?’ Do I detect a touch of irony tucked away there?

Let’s be fair to the retailers. It’s not only they who are responsible for the commercialisation of our daily lives.

We invariably refer to great sporting events these days by the names of their commercial sponsors, rather than the event itself.

The Olympics haven’t yet become the ‘Coca- Cola Games’, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

When the games come to London, try sneaking into the stands with a cold drink -supplied by someone other than the official sponsor. You’ll get your collar felt for sure.

There’s a big row over the Olympic Games in China in 2008. U.S.,The American television companies are forcing the rescheduling of some of the big events to suit their schedules, even though it means they will start at idiotic times in the host city. It’s all about selling the advertising slots.

So, given all this, I suppose the only approach is to make the most of it and play them at their own game.

You could, if you wished to avoid carols in August, do your Christmas shopping on the internet. I counted roughly 390 sites dedicated to ‘Christmas shopping’ yesterday.

And you can always pick up bargains. The best time to buy garden furniture is, apparently, in January. The Christmas stocks have gone by then.

And the best time to buy the Christmas decorations? The January sales, of course.

If enough of us did that, maybe we’d no longer get Christmas in summer.